Frère
surname · Latin script
Meaning: brother (relation, relative)
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/fʁɛʁ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Frère is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in France than in any other country.
- FRFrance≈1 in 25K(inferred from the name graph)
- BEBelgium1 in 9.6K
- CACanada≈1 in 261K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- France (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 208 (measured from records)
- 1 in 9.6K (inferred from the name graph)
≈2,700 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Belgium
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
brother (relation, relative)
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 24 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Frère counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FR France | ≈2,700 est. | ≈1 in 25K | 375 | Frère | 208 |
| BE Belgium | 1,226 | 1 in 9.6K | 1.2K | Frère | 57 |
| BR Brazil | 720 | 1 in 294K | 720 | — | — |
| US United States | 439 | 1 in 758K | 508 | Frère | 91 |
| CA Canada | ≈140 est. | ≈1 in 261K | — | Frère | 27 |
| ZA South Africa | ≈110 est. | ≈1 in 538K | listed | — | 1 |
Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Frère is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In nrm, brother
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Walthère Frère-Orbanb. 1812BEBelgian politician (1812-1896)
- Edouard Frèreb. 1819FRFrench painter (1819-1886)
- Alfred Frèreb. 1851BEBelgian architect
- Aubert Frèreb. 1881FRFrench soldier (1881–1944)
- Jules Frèreb. 1881BEBelgian poet, writer and lawyer (1881-1937)
- Maurice Frèreb. 1890BEBelgian civil servant (1890–1970)
- Paul Frèreb. 1917FRBelgian racecar driver and journalist
- Albert Frèreb. 1926BEBelgian businessman (1926–2018)
- Gérald Frèreb. 1951BEBelgian businessman
- Marie-Soleil Frèreb. 1969BEBelgian researcher (1969–2021)
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 9 sources across 4 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 1.2K | #1,029 |
| BE Belgium | Statbel — Noms de famille (family names) | — | 1.1K | #1,142 |
Reference works 4
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Frère mean, and where does it come from?
- brother (relation, relative) Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- How do you pronounce Frère?
- A machine transcription gives /fʁɛʁ/ (IPA) for French.
- In which country does Frère have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 2.7 thousand people named Frère in France, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled frère.
- Where is Frère most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Frère is densest in Belgium — about 1 in 9.6 thousand people — even though France holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Frère?
- In Belgium, the national register counted 1,226 people named Frère in 2008, about 1 in 9.6 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Frère?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/fr%C3%A8reThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Frère”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.